If the mouse poniter changes to a 'text entry' bar before clicking on
the backwards link button from the Google toolbar, is this indicating
something odd about the web-site being viewed

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Request for Question Clarification by aceresearcher-ga on 15 Jul 2004 10:12 PDT

Greetings, worrier!

The standard Google Toolbar does not have a "backward links" button.
http://toolbar.google.com/button_help.html
http://toolbar.google.com/options_help.html
http://toolbar.google.com

Do you perhaps have a 3rd-party add-in that has placed a "backward
links" button on your Google Toolbar?

Regards,

aceresearcher

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Clarification of Question by worrier-ga on 15 Jul 2004 10:39 PDT

Hi AceResearcher,
I posted the question in haste. One you click on the information
button ( 'blue' i ), you are shown 4 options. The third option is the
'backward links' button.
For example on web-site www.techno-mart.co.uk, the mouse pointer
changes when pointing to the backward links option, to the 'text
entry' bar.
Am I making sense?

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Request for Question Clarification by aceresearcher-ga on 15 Jul 2004 10:51 PDT

Ah! That makes more sense.

I tried my Google Toolbar's I ==> backward links that same site and
did not get a text cursor (which is what I think you are talking
about). Have you tried shutting down and restarting your computer to
see if the phenomenon goes away?

Some adware and spyware programs out there *do* diddle with the Google
Toolbar. It's possible that you've picked up a nasty infection that's
causing the phenomenon.

Regards,

ace

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Clarification of Question by worrier-ga on 15 Jul 2004 11:07 PDT

Hi Ace,
The worrying thing is, the text cursor, only appears on a few sites,
whose backward links I am looking at. Again worryingly, these sites
looking like they are spamming. Is this perhaps a way, Google has, to
mark sites that are spamming.
I am not a 'techie', but have an e-commerce site, that has been
offered a link from a web-site, that would add value from a search
point of view, but again the text cursor appears when I check the
backward links from this other web-site.

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Request for Question Clarification by aceresearcher-ga on 15 Jul 2004 11:27 PDT

With as much certainty as anyone can have regarding things Google, I
am pretty darn certain that the people at Google have not implemented
such an indicator. Even if they had, wouldn't it work for me at the
same site as it did for you? I think that it is far more likely a
glitch, or something caused by 3rd party software on your system.

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Clarification of Question by worrier-ga on 15 Jul 2004 11:42 PDT

Hi Ace,
I am going to try this on another computer, and I shall give you an
update tomorrow.

best regards
worrier

Hi there,

From what I can see, this seems to be nothing more than a bug within
the Google toolbar and indicates nothing about the website itself. I
opened up your example site and hovered over the Backwards Links
button and it did indeed change to the text cursor; however, if you
take a closer look you'll see that it does that on more than just the
Backwards Links button. If you click the drop down box for Search Web
you'll see that the pointer changes to the text cursor on at least a
few of them. What seems to be the problem is that the pointer changes
to the text cursor because of the text that is behind the drop down
box of the toolbar. You'll notice that it only changes to the text
cursor when there is text to select behind the drop down box, not in
empty spaces. This is better illustrated farther down your example
page in the section on Laptop Information.

So, the question you really want to know is why does this happen in
the first place? I couldn't find any other web sites where I could
reproduce the problem so I took the source code of your example page
above and started playing around with it. Eventually I figured out
that the cursor changes are caused by the <marquee> tags on the page.
Get rid of them and bam! No more cursor changes.

Anyway, I hope this answers your question and keeps you from worrying
that something is wrong with sites where this problem shows up!

Regards,
Deadlychiapet

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Request for Answer Clarification by worrier-ga on 16 Jul 2004 02:25 PDT

Hi deadly,
The web-site I am worried about has one <marquee> tag :
<marquee align="middle" scrolldelay="150">
what do I do to test your theory. Remember I am not a techie, so you
might have to guide me slowly. ( I am sorry, I can't divulge the
web-site name).
In response to AceResearcher, I tried on several computers, and I am
getting the same result. But it is strange that you are not getting
the text cursor & deadlychiapet is!

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Clarification of Answer by deadlychiapet-ga on 16 Jul 2004 10:10 PDT

Hi again,

Thank you for the generous tip, it's much appreciated! As to testing
out my theory, all you have to do is delete the <marquee> tag
temporarily, or put comments around it like this <!--<marquee
align="middle" scrolldelay="150">--> and reload the page. You should
see that the Google bar has stopped changing to the text cursor on the
drop down menus.

Another way to test it would be to take a page of yours that you know
works fine and add <marquee> tags to it. Anything will do really,
<marquee>sdfsdfds</marquee> will work, as will your example tag above.
You should see that adding the tags will cause the text cursor.

Finally, if you are trying to test a website that is not yours here's
what you can do. Navigate to the site in Internet Explorer and then
click File and then Save as. Save the page somewhere on your computer
and make the "Save as type" drop down box says "Web Page, complete."
Next open the copy of the page stored on your computer and you should
see that it still has the same problems with the text cursor. So, to
test out my theory you can open up the page in a text editor or
whatever HTML editor you use, delete all of the marquee tags, and then
save it again. When you're finished that try opening the page. You
should see that the text cursor problem no longer appears.

Hope that helps!
Deadlychiapet

Immediately seems to be the right answer. Thank you very much for that.